Tigidou Lay Lay

Film vs Book

It is all about reading between the lines. And in the movie version of the Great Gatsby it is quite hard to do so because it is so different from the book and so similar at the same time. There are motifs which has changed and some motifs which were added. But how does it differ from the book? Well let's start with the vest buckles.

In the movie there is a motif that has been added that was not in the book. That motif is the most important motif in the movie but was never even mentioned in the book. The vest buckles this motif is used to show the theme "Recapture the past". It is something that Daisy gave gatsby in the past when they were together and that he kept on him until death. The importance of those buckles are very well shown in the movie with the large amounts of extreme closups on them.

The car in the movie is not yellow. It was white instead, and this does not change too much the motifs origin but it does if you argue that the color yellow relates the sun and light to the car and then relate it to the motif of Sun and Light. White can also be seen as a bright light color so it is a little bit played around with but does not change the whole motif.

In the movie the light and dark contrast was kept as in the book with the rainy days or the very hot days full of sunlight. It was even easier to visualize because a movie is more visual than a book and also the camera style changed to give a more dramatic view of the scene and the music also helped give a feeling of darkness and sadness into the viewers.

So the movie kept some motifs, changed others slithly and also added a whole new motif but the big idea of the movie was kept the same and the scenes were almost all the same except for the small dialogue changes that the director added to the movie and also a few extra metaphors but it did not hurt the flow of the story one bit.